[jstout66]

I know this sounds pretty elementary, but have you checked every tube in the set? I've run into problems with the early RCA's, that if a tube is bad, even in a different circuit, it can throw things "off". One time I had a bad horizontal osc tube in a CTC-16. The horizontal was fine, but I had no color!! That was the only bad tube in the set, so I changed it, and guess what??Color!! It also sounds like you need to adjust the AGC control if it made that a big a difference from rabbit ears to cable. Also the 3.58 osc may be bad..... And this is just my opinion, but I notice some people tend to think "worst case scenario" when working on these sets and start ripping everything apart, without checking the simple stuff first. It's best to start out with checking every tube, and go from there. There still are some sets out there that need very little work to come back to life... Good Luck!